Peter Mendelsund, Osamu Tezuka and Vertical Publishing

This is a bit of an "out of the box" topic, but I wanted to share two of my favorite artists/designers, Peter Mendelsund, a graphic designer known for his book covers (If you've heard of Vertical inc., he took the place of Chipp Kidd as essentially their in-house designers), and Osamu Tezuka, a comic/cartooning master from japan (Astro Boy, Black Jack, etc).

Vertical is a NYC based publishing firm who have been publishing various "alternative" and "old school" manga in the past several years. Pairing classic 60's-70's manga like Osamu Tezuka's work with such radical modern design sense as Chipp Kidd and Peter Mendelsund leads to some really amazing must-have books.

On hand, I have two of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack comics to share, and then I've included some LQ images from the internet of some other work.

Osamu Tezuka is known for a lot of things ("the father of manga"), but he has a unique storytelling sensibility, character and narrative design, as well as a keen awareness of (sorry, unrelated to books) panel layout in his stories that make them very exciting, even after all these years.


Peter Mendelsund does a _lot_ of book covers, along with his Osamu Tezuka work, he's also done some other impressive work like the Steig Larsson "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" covers.  You can check out his work and his blog at ( http://bookcoverarchive.com/Peter_Mendelsund and http://jacketmechanical.blogspot.com/ )


Vertical is a really interesting publisher in terms of their design sense and also "what they like to publish" too, although it's really mainly english translations of japanese work. All their books are very "desirable" objects for me, not only because of content, but because their covers look gorgeous, on a shelf on in a hand. Here's a link to their website: http://www.vertical-inc.com/

Junko Mizuno's Characters

Hi, I decided to showcase some of the illustrator Junko Mizuno's works. Her work centers around fine art illustration prints as well as her own graphic novel and picture-centric book works (including some picture books), such as Cinderella, Hell Babies, Pure Trance and Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu.

Her technique and characters are very interesting, combining the nostalgic sensibilities of extremely girly 70's manga/comics and girl/"pink" toy design (Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony) with a very dark story telling and character development. Though her drawings may look straight out of a 70s or 80s hasbro toy commercial, the stories she tells tend towards being very graphic & somewhat dark, but satirical as well. Light hearted Sex, death (murder), zombies, cannibalism, torture etc.

I think one of her strongest aspects is her character design. Her story telling is very good also- and she does both write and illustrate her works. She works in a variety of media, I know at least acrylic and digital.

You can find out more about her work here: http://www.mizuno-junko.com/



Some of her works have also become toys!

PS:

Here is a high-res scan of the comic book Pure Trance's cover and one of the inside spreads! :)

Marc Boutavant

Marc Boutavant

Marc Boutavant is an illustrator, graphic artist and comic strip author. He has illustrated numerous young people's books with Actes Sud junior, Nathan, Seuil jeunesse and Mila. For Albin Michel Jeunesse, he illustrated Le Popotin de l'hippopofor the Zephyr collection, and in 2002 he started to create his own animal universe with Mouk, his own series of childrens' books at Editions Mila. He was born in Bourgogne in 1970 and lives in Paris.

http://www.heartagency.com/artist/MarcBoutavant/gallery/1

Ted Carpenter